Creating Exposed Trusses in Home Designer Pro

QUESTION

In Home Designer Pro, how can I create exposed roof trusses in a room with a cathedral ceiling?

ANSWER

When a roof truss is drawn in Home Designer Pro, the program locates a roof plane to define the top chords of the truss, and a ceiling plane to define the location of the bottom chord. You can create exposed trusses by creating a ceiling to define where you want the trusses' bottom chords, drawing the trusses, and then removing the ceiling.

To set up the structure for exposed trusses

Open the plan file in which you would like to create exposed roof trusses.

In this example, a simple rectangular structure is used.

If your plan has multiple floors, go up to the floor where you want to create exposed trusses.

Select Edit> Default Settings from the menu. Select Floor from the Default Settings list and click the Edit button.

On the Structure panel of the Floor Defaults dialog for the current floor:

Specify the desired top plate height for your bearing walls as the Rough Ceiling height, then click OK. This will also be the height of your roof truss bottom chords in a standard truss. (In version 9 and prior, specify the Ceiling height.)

Specifying the Ceiling height in the Floor Defaults dialog will affect all rooms set to use the default on the current floor. If you want to modify the Ceiling height of only one room in your plan, you can do so on the Structure panel of the room's specification dialog.

In the Default Settings dialog, select Framing from the list and click the Edit button.

In the Framing Defaults dialog:

Go the Trusses panel and specify the desired Member Depth and Maximum Span for your trusses.

In this example, the Depth values are set at 8" and the span values are unchanged.

On the Roof panel, specify the desired truss width in the Rafter Width text field.

Click OK to close the Framing Defaults dialog, then click Done to close the Default Settings dialog.

Select Build> Roof> Build Roof from the menu.

In the Build Roof dialog:

Check Build Roof Planes on the Roof panel;

Check Trusses (No Birdsmouth)

Specify the desired Pitch and other attributes of the roof;

Click OK to close the dialog and build the roof.

Make any needed modifications to the ceiling to produce truss bottom chords that meet your needs. For example,

Use the default flat ceiling to produce a standard truss:

Raise the ceiling height of a room to produce a modified truss with a raised bottom chord (make a note of the original value before doing so):